In the spirit of election season, representatives of Forward Wyoming spoke to student senators at Tuesday’s ASUW meeting.
Forward Wyoming is a nonpartisan, nonprofit movement to get students and citizens active in their communities and involved with the issues that affect them, especially through voter engagement.
“Our mission is to make sure people to vote in the upcoming election,” Tyler Wolfgang, field organizer, said. “We’re not going to empower you, we want you to find that empowerment so you can go out and vote.”
Since its beginning in 2014, Forward Wyoming has focused on getting voters in the 18-35 year-old demographic to turn out after a mere 8 percent voted in that year’s general elections.
“We’re trying to make sure voters know how to get registered or just how to vote,” Wolfgang said.
Senators ran through a quiz covering important voter know-how, such as submitting absentee ballots from the comfort of your own home, finding your polling location and the many forms of ID that can be used to vote.
As a body of student representatives, ASUW is an important point of contact for Forward Wyoming as it seeks to reach out to UW students. Senators were encouraged to continue making efforts to connect with their constituents and get eligible voters informed and active.
Forward Wyoming is also making its own foray onto the UW campus by forming a new RSO as an extension of the organization, and welcomes anyone interested in joining.
New business for the week was the first reading of SB-2634: ASUW Support for the Pilot Hill Project, which states the student government’s official support for UW participation in the purchase of more than five thousand acres of undeveloped land east of Laramie, which would be added and open to the community at a cost of $10.5 million.
